Addiction and solving it in layman’s terms: Book of addictions

An addiction is a habituated practice of substance intake, of acting and of a way of thinking and the consequences such practice produces. In terms of its consequences, the damage of an addiction outweighs by a million times its benefits. Watch out for the things you are into in life that combine habit and damage.

Before we go any further with my Book of Addictions, I would want to introduce myself. I am the kind of guy who would go and try to find something to get himself addicted to. Shortly before the start of this work, I had dealt a major blow to my habit of watching rated 18+ content and “self-abuse”. I also wish I could take this paragraph back, but it is my job to write about myself, hoping that someone might find what I write helpful.

I am not an expert. This work is from my journal. I erased the dates. But here is a detail of what was coming out of my thoughts each day I faced my battles against various addictions I ever drown myself into and those of the people I counted on. Read it. I hope it might help you to fight better.

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Thinking in the negative as an addiction

A way of thinking can be an addiction. Thinking in the negative alone can pull one down. It is dangerous to tell yourself these words: “I will never make it!” Because you have higher chances of having told yourself the same words a million times by the end our your life.

In 2014, an addiction successfully conquered me, it hibernated and classified itself as a feature and not a bug by its victim. I could think of drug addicts as addicted people and not porn addicts. Most addictions steal the show with this trick, and thus they are spared from an addiction purging system one might have lined up. When a bug is considered a feature, it gets all the updates to keep conquering your system.

If think in the negative and believe that you are in your best positive, you will never make it to your actual positive. Thinking in the negative becomes an addiction and a mindset. It becomes a mindset standing like a bulwark so that it cannot be formatted easily and replaced by another.

To update this bug that is a negative mindset you join like others who help it grow. You join people who think the same; “We will never make it.” A mindset is easily an addiction, some graffiti written on the very factory of your thoughts. Its purpose: To make sure that each thought is written in the way it is intended, negative or positive.

You cannot free yourself from what you do not regard as an oppressor even if you are thrice oppressed than others who are gaining their freedom. This is a condition in and around our lives that even our manipulators capitalise on. Once you are addicted, you have an oppressor you consider to be your saviour. You feel good at the burn of each cigar. An addiction pulls down your defence mechanisms so that it becomes a disease with a cure but one that cannot let you invite the much-needed cure.

Fellow video gamers as your secondary addiction

An addiction gives you connections. A video game, for example, whether you play it online or offline, invites you a good count of opponents to help you realise that you are a hero. The group, the companions, opponents, or whatever you might call them, become a secondary addiction that you must quit first to be able to quit the primary video game addiction.

The secondary addiction calculates the means to get you to stay in the primary addiction through it’s natural intelligence. It knows what to call you “Alpha Militant”, “Royal Navy” or “Mohowk” and when to do that when praising your style of play. This group is one major reason why you wake up with one goal, that is to play that video game. When goals are unplanned. Goals are a waste.

Game developers in building games utilise the fast-evolving computer hardware and the internet infrastructure to build groups loyal to what they offer. WiFi hotspots, cables, consoles, and the Internet keep players in multi-player mode with or without the internet. Internet connection is now cheaper than before. We now have more reasons to be addicted than ever before and to catch up with secondary addictions. As most get addicted a few find means to sell what addicts and reap forkliftable bills.

When you read reviews of a game, you frequently come across “addicting” when the game is good as if being addicting is a positive feature. “Addicting” which is a hypernym to threatening has been transformed into “excellent”.

Addiction’s false strength

You are given false strength to hold on to while your actual strength is being drained away. You get to believe in that strength and then it will surely take you to false destinations. You see yourself conquering, and being on top of the situation. But have you conquered in real life?

An addiction is one place to be a hero to yourself while you are drowning. It puts you on top of top of the situation while the reality is way off.

True strength is applicable. It is an asset that can buy you anything in this life. True strength makes you better and better, a person with mistakes to learn from. An addiction had the habit of making strength extinct. There is not a thing that prevents your rise more than that which drains the strength you must convert into a step up or a step trying.

There is no true strength that beats being what you truly promised yourself to be. An addiction leaves you room to quit the promises. My dad, a chain smoker during his time, said to me, “You have to be aware of the result you will get out of each cigar. Even if you know that the satisfaction you will get is beaten by expectations sixfold, you just can’t sleep without having smoked if you are a chain smoker.” More than being a moment of satisfaction smoking becomes a ritual that gives you life, a thing non-smokers get free without having to smoke.

My personal experience told me that whenever the body loses its physical energy to what cannot pay you off, the mind loses the power to power the body to what pays off. Negative thinking multiplies. If you are to read my article “How did I become a blogger” you will learn that my addiction to rated 18+ content delayed the coming of success by more than half a decade.

Addiction taps into reserves of energy and drains them so that in the presence of what pays off the reserves are already used essentials. I remember sleeping in this seminar room but watching my then-usual stuff for up to three hours instead of reading. After watching, an intermittent nap would take over.

This is the other condition in life: Nothing can buy you the strength you do not have.

Unemancipatable is a slave who regards his enslavers as saviours, for he lacks not only the powers to say it’s enough but lacks the power to think that he should say so. Manipulators have mastered the art of getting people they manipulate to get addicted to them. People addicted to other persons tend to become slaves and still fail to see themselves as enslaved but saved.

Perspective and the modern tech

A sniper’s higher ground is his point of clarity. Addiction gives you a corrupted viewpoint. It makes you forget that the tech we have is a resource that one in the past could not have. To draw something two hundred years ago one required tools that could not easily give him company everywhere he went. My ancestors were still a little far from getting exposed to the writing technology.

Now it’s a different story. I can now track my expenses, manage my documents, connect with family and friends, and learn something using just a phone. But that different story is rubbed off by an overload of media that must be consumed in favour of productivity. Worse we do not regard excessive media consumption as an addiction.

When the perspective is corrupted, strength turns into weakness. Your ability to wake up early becomes getting up early and donating an hour to another Tik-tok streak. Modern tech’s default function is to do no harm to the humanity. But the harm stands by the way. It is not because we have an addicting object that is a phone for example but because we can’t put the phone into positive use.

When you can’t avoid the addicting modern tech. Put yourself on a higher ground and see how best you can extract positivity out of that addiction. You can’t just easily go on with your day-to-day business without a phone and a computer. The people you have to deal with and communicate with rely on the phone as a communication tool.

Addicted in negative terms to your smartphone? I recommend a way I tried before. Delete your social media accounts and disappear for seven months. If you are to come back use the likes of Facebook as advertisement tools. Let someone run the ads for you if you can afford.

Social Media giants now know that they can benefit from you getting addicted to their platforms that from you posting sponsored ads to them. If you have a Facebook Page you surely have seen Reels invading our Facebook Pages. They just want you to get addicted because real sponsored money come from people and companies who manage their Pages through employees.

Do this:

Do not stay connected to the Internet. Give your phone a quota of four hours a day.
Fill you phone with productivity apps and try to use them. Try to fill your to-do list in your To-Do app even if you will never follow through.
Sleep the phone and use your laptop for most of the tasks on the Web. A laptop is better at productivity.

Self-respect

My problem was not that I was addicted. It was my failure to see that I was addicted. When I allowed myself to see that I was addicted I walked out of the addiction. How was I able to see that I was addicted? I simply believed from those who argue that watching explicit content is an addiction. Doing what you must is part of self-respect. If there is an impediment stopping you from doing what you must do, eliminating that impediment is still part of self-respect.

Self-respect is listening to an inner command, being what you promised yourself to be and doing what you must. What threatens that self-respect is an enemy of self-respect.

The prime targets of addiction are non-renewables and time is one. My dad had trouble with sleepless nights when he ran out of cigars. He wished he had been able to fend off pressure from his peers and stayed a non-smoker. I blamed growing up in a family of violence and told myself that 18+ was a vent through which I escaped the horrors of the past.

Why is it easier to blame others who drove you into the addiction instead of just quitting? My dad suggested that when addicted, we run away from our responsibilities. The best way to do so is to pile a list of contributors in the past, future and present to the crisis that you are living in. You become innocent and a victim of neglect by others.

You will certainly never win in a war against an addiction only by being responsible because tobacco will give you nicotine to stay ready for the next cigar. But that lack of self-respect combined with the pressures of the moment at a very stage in life where you can easily break to pressure is the reason why we get addicted.

My dad had offered a wonderful birthday gift for my birthday six months before it. He said he was going to quit cigars. He died thirteen years later a smoker. Things that take time to destroy require more than patience for you to be able to destroy them. Patience when applied to what you wish to improve about yourself is the highest form of self-respect. You don’t have to quit in one day but rather quit step by step daily, chiselling little by little all that makes your addiction stand. You need to quit old friends, places that aid the addiction.

The process of leaving an addiction behind is one of connecting with the true self buried deep inside, calling it to come upfront to act its wonders. It is that of reclamation. To accomplish this purpose you need to get back to your goals, ambition and what you promised youself to keep chasing in this life and give them your good time. Think positively. Build good habits and do some regular exercises. I found exercises the best cure to the problem I had.

You can’t use an addicting substance, activity or ideology to spark your creativity. Here is why?

Me vs “Me” in a conversation, once upon a time.

Me: Do you still want it?

“Me”: No!

Me: Then why are you still doing it?

“Me”: It’s not a matter of it that does it. It is a matter of getting used to it and depending on it for false strength that does it. I will have to get used to not getting used to it.

Me: It will take some time to be stronger at resisting what you are used to.

Once you are addicted imagination becomes hallucinations. You feel having a service to yourself that improves your efficiency by doing what can harm you. What you are addicted to makes you forget questioning its function in your life, but praise a role it plays that isn’t. Addiction prevents one’s loneliness from turning into a resource. It plants a not-to-be-detected misery into loneliness.

You may know people who turned their addictions into fortunes like 24/7 gamers who make money playing and reviewing games, but that doesn’t justify building an addiction to video gaming for you. For the greater part, any addiction is is a plane you can never get to land. At takeoff the ride is fun. The fun then turns into misery. The best way to put an end to an endless ride is to avoid and never to be on one entirely.

To answer the question in the heading above, I would give a few observations I made when I was addicted to explicit content. An addiction does not find a blank person with no aspirations in life. This is why it prefers to build at a phase where you are growing fast in your critical and constructive thinking, shortly before you become a young adult or soon after. In this phase, you have a life-defining pursuit that you need to focus on and there is no time out for this, except you let there be one.

You “act the addiction” after a long phase of thinking about it or a “phase of lust”. “Acting the addiction” is taking another sip, pull, another streak of watching more explicit content, thinking in the negative and so forth. Just as the second or minutes of the acting phase ends some regret it while some feel some false revival of their strength. Some repeat the acting phase over and over, losing their precious time. This time lost is what those who feel strength in getting high are blinded by what addicts them from seeing.

After the act or series of acts, a short recovery phase takes over. In this recovery phase, regrets and hesitation to do work are not uncommon. As recovery ends one starts to do work, perform, address goals and “think positively” This post-recovery phase does not last forever before new lust and acting phases take over.

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